Inevitably, there came a day when Philip was away on a business trip, Professor Marsham was recording a broadcast in Manchester on the initiation rites of the Wai-Titi and Jenny’s mother was staying with her and longed only to put the children to bed undisturbed.
‘I suppose… you wouldn’t care to come to the concert in the City Hall?’ asked Thomas hesitantly, and waited — as the nicest men seem to go on doing all their lives — for a rebuff.
‘I’d love to,’ said Jenny, overcome by the honour of being chosen by the lecturer. ‘It’s the Brahms Fourth, isn’t it? I love that. The bit in the second movement…’
So they went to the concert.
A shared love of great music is known to be the greatest aphrodisiac of them all. If it had been Bach, Jenny thought later, perhaps it would have been all right. We might have been uplifted, but not the other thing. Instead, in the second movement, at the exact phrase that always sent her soaring, Thomas turned and smiled at her. After which the thing was done.
They walked home hand in hand through the darkening streets of the industrial city which had suddenly become Elysium. The uncertainty and fear of rebuff were over, the plotting and scheming not yet begun. A halcyon interval; the best, perhaps, in any love affair. They kissed chastely and parted. Thomas had his hair cut, bought a new shirt and gave a series of lectures on ‘The Nature of Speech Acts’ which left even the stroppiest of his students gasping with admiration. Jenny sang about the house, lingered in her garden to touch the papery calices of her daffodils and bought a new nightdress to take off for Philip when he got back from his trip.
Both of them felt wonderfully happy and very, very good.
There followed the next stage, so familiar to all who have trodden this well-worn path: the attempt to open up the friendship, fit it into the quadrilateral of conventional married life. Jenny accordingly gave a little dinner party for Thomas and his wife and the most intellectual of Philip’s business friends, a couple who had done PPE at Oxford.
The dinner party was a success. Jenny wore a dark red skirt and a white blouse and cooked Boeuf Bourguignon and Crime brulee. There was a great deal to drink. Philip liked Thomas, who was extremely witty about university politics, and Jenny liked Professor Marjorie who made her laugh like anything about the kinship systems of the He-He. By this time, however, it was too late, Thomas and Jenny retaining little from the evening except the look in the other’s eye.
It was now that Jenny began to fight. She fought honestly and hard — for her husband, Philip, whom she truly loved; for her own peace of mind and sense of honour, her deep-rooted, uncomplicated belief in an open life; above all for her children, who would pay the price if her indiscretions ricocheted.
She had always turned to the printed word for comfort, so now she removed from her bedside table the women’s magazines, biographies and novels with which she usually read herself to sleep and substituted — but gradually, so as not to arouse Philip’s suspicions — the great cookery books of religion and ethics wherein the sages of the world have given their recipes for the good life. Thus Jenny borrowed, bought or scrounged the Tao Te Ching (which informed her that Desire is Illusion), the Dhammapada (which besought her to Straighten her Mind like a Fletcher Straightens his Arrow) and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, that great Stoic, who regarded it as essential to have nothing in one’s mind that could not immediately be spoken aloud to others. She read also a treatise called The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts and just to keep her options open, she read the Quiet Corner of Patience Strong.
The only thing she didn’t read was the Bible. She didn’t read the Bible because she knew what the Bible had to say on the subject of adultery. The Bible said one should not commit it. As far as she could remember, the Bible did not say why one should not commit it, it just said one should not. This struck Jenny as useless and unfair; also old-fashioned in a way which even she, morally stranded as she apparently was in the Middle Ages, regarded as going altogether too far.
She struggled on in this way for several weeks and in his smoke-filled, book-littered room in the university, Thomas Marsham — nominally finishing a thesis on ‘The Relationship of Quality to the Objective World’ — struggled also. Though more intelligent than Jenny, he was not a great deal wiser, nor did the discipline of his subject greatly aid him for philosophy has never been famous for producing men able to bring the concepts of duty, truth and morality to bear on their private lives.
Philip, throughout this time, remained fond and attentive. Jenny would not in any case have attempted the ‘he takes me for granted’ routine, since it had always seemed to her that if married people did not grant themselves, each to the other, to take, then marriage was something other than she had supposed.
Term had ended, the lecture course was over. Thomas and Jenny were compelled to meet in secret for occasions referred to as ‘only’ having lunch or ‘only’ going for a walk. Perhaps it was the falseness of the word ‘only’ that made Jenny finally throw in the sponge. Changing her dress three times in order ‘only’ to meet Thomas for a cup of tea in the refectory, rushing back through the darkening streets with a thumping heart, terrified that the children would be home before her, she experienced such self-loathing at her hypocrisy that for a moment it drowned everything else. That night she packed away the great cookery books of living. The next morning she rang Thomas at the university and in a voice almost inaudible with fright, told him she would meet him in London.
The peace of mind which is supposed to follow any firm decision did not follow. Nor, come to that, did peace of body. But she stuck it out and behaved with efficiency, organising first the confidante so necessary for this kind of enterprise — a warm-hearted, rackety friend called Christine who had divorced her husband and lived a cheerfully promiscuous life somewhere off the Earl’s Court Road. Christine sent an eager invitation to an imaginary school reunion; Philip was delighted for her to go; her mother swooped happily on the children and bore them off to her cottage. Jenny threw up in the lavatory, had a hot bath and tottered, light-headed from sleeplessness, on to the 8.57 train.
Thomas was waiting at Euston. He had bought a new jacket and cut himself a little shaving. Meeting, they were suddenly violently shy and embarrassed and in the taxi avoided each other’s eyes.
Then, outside the hotel, Jenny suddenly exploded into sophistication, well-being and joy. She felt completely relaxed, wonderfully worldly. There was only one more moment of anxiety and that the worst of all, far transcending any guilt: the terror of not pleasing — and then that, too, was past.
That first time there was mostly relief at having somehow not failed each other, but afterwards they talked in the way that men and women do talk at such a time — perhaps the only time that human speech, being no longer necessary, becomes what it was meant to be. Later they went out to eat and already the alchemy was at work, transforming Thomas from a gauche academic into a courteous and charming host; changing Jenny from a diffident housewife into a subtle and witty woman of the world. When they got back to the hotel they were already old-established friends and lovers and this time found themselves carried by that strange and mysterious act into a place which marvellously mingled gaiety and peace.